Ying Jiao

Ying Jiao, Rodrigo Castellano Ontiveros, Luc De Raedt et al.

Neurosymbolic (NeSy) AI aims to combine the strengths of neural architectures and symbolic reasoning to improve the accuracy, interpretability, and generalization capability of AI models. While logic inference on top of subsymbolic modules has been shown to effectively guarantee these properties, this often comes at the cost of reduced scalability, which can severely limit the usability of NeSy models. This paper introduces DeepProofLog (DPrL), a novel NeSy system based on stochastic logic programs, which addresses the scalability limitations of previous methods. DPrL parameterizes all derivation steps with neural networks, allowing efficient neural guidance over the proving system. Additionally, we establish a formal mapping between the resolution process of our deep stochastic logic programs and Markov Decision Processes, enabling the application of dynamic programming and reinforcement learning techniques for efficient inference and learning. This theoretical connection improves scalability for complex proof spaces and large knowledge bases. Our experiments on standard NeSy benchmarks and knowledge graph reasoning tasks demonstrate that DPrL outperforms existing state-of-the-art NeSy systems, advancing scalability to larger and more complex settings than previously possible.

Ying Jiao, Luc De Raedt, Giuseppe Marra

Large language models have been used to translate natural language questions to SQL queries. Without hard constraints on syntax and database schema, they occasionally produce invalid queries that are not executable. These failures limit the usage of these systems in real-life scenarios. We propose a neurosymbolic framework that imposes SQL syntax and schema constraints with unification-based definite clause grammars and thus guarantees the generation of valid queries. Our framework also builds a bi-directional interface to language models to leverage their natural language understanding abilities. The evaluation results on a subset of SQL grammars show that all our output queries are valid. This work is the first step towards extending language models with unification-based grammars. We demonstrate this extension enhances the validity, execution accuracy, and ground truth alignment of the underlying language model by a large margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/ML-KULeuven/deepstochlog-lm.

Andreas Opedal, Alessandro Stolfo, Haruki Shirakami et al.

There is increasing interest in employing large language models (LLMs) as cognitive models. For such purposes, it is central to understand which properties of human cognition are well-modeled by LLMs, and which are not. In this work, we study the biases of LLMs in relation to those known in children when solving arithmetic word problems. Surveying the learning science literature, we posit that the problem-solving process can be split into three distinct steps: text comprehension, solution planning and solution execution. We construct tests for each one in order to understand whether current LLMs display the same cognitive biases as children in these steps. We generate a novel set of word problems for each of these tests, using a neuro-symbolic approach that enables fine-grained control over the problem features. We find evidence that LLMs, with and without instruction-tuning, exhibit human-like biases in both the text-comprehension and the solution-planning steps of the solving process, but not in the final step, in which the arithmetic expressions are executed to obtain the answer.

Sander Schildermans, Chang Tian, Ying Jiao et al.

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has advanced rapidly, yet faithfully capturing spatial relationships described in natural language prompts remains a major challenge. Prior efforts have addressed this issue through prompt optimization, spatially grounded generation, and semantic refinement. This work introduces a lightweight approach that augments prompts with tuple-based structured information, using a fine-tuned language model for automatic conversion and seamless integration into T2I pipelines. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements in spatial accuracy, without compromising overall image quality as measured by Inception Score. Furthermore, the automatically generated tuples exhibit quality comparable to human-crafted tuples. This structured information provides a practical and portable solution to enhance spatial relationships in T2I generation, addressing a key limitation of current large-scale generative systems.

Aleksa Jelaca, Ying Jiao, Chang Tian et al.

Text-to-image generation has advanced rapidly with large-scale multimodal training, yet fine-grained controllability remains a critical challenge. Counterfactual controllability, defined as the capacity to deliberately generate images that contradict common-sense patterns, remains a major challenge but plays a crucial role in enabling creativity and exploratory applications. In this work, we address this gap with a focus on counterfactual size (e.g., generating a tiny walrus beside a giant button) and propose an automatic prompt engineering framework that adapts base prompts into revised prompts for counterfactual images. The framework comprises three components: an image evaluator that guides dataset construction by identifying successful image generations, a supervised prompt rewriter that produces revised prompts, and a DPO-trained ranker that selects the optimal revised prompt. We construct the first counterfactual size text-image dataset and enhance the image evaluator by extending Grounded SAM with refinements, achieving a 114 percent improvement over its backbone. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and ChatGPT-4o, establishing a foundation for future research on counterfactual controllability.